April's Must-Read Books

Here are the new must-reads in April.

Hannah Rothschild's The Baroness: The Search for Nica, the Rebellious Rothschild (Knopf) is an intensely personal and poised portrait of her British-born great-aunt, who left their immensely wealthy banking family in the 1950s for a creative, eccentric, unexpected life as the generous benefactor and minder of the American jazz piano genius Thelonious Monk.

Surfing life

Former beach-volleyball champion and model Gabrielle Reece, with writer Karen Karbo, tells her life like it is, and isn't, in My Foot Is Too Big for the Glass Slipper (Scribner), an exuberant, right-on, and humorous hand-holder to confronting the crises, celebrating the victories, and—after a separation—achieving the middle ground in her marriage to world-famous big-wave surfer Laird Hamilton.

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The shock of the now

Douglas Rushkoff's Present Shock (Current) takes off from Alvin Toffler's conversation changer Future Shock (1970), which examined how a speeded-up world was corroding our coping skills. Rushkoff posits that the digital-tech age promotes a future-is-nowness that ignores temporal perspectives (such as saving money or storytelling), stranding us in an ever more trivialized present.